Looting Matters: Are New Museums Acquisition Policies Having an Impact on Private Collectors?
SWANSEA, Wales, Aug. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- David Gill, archaeologist, reflects on the impact of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) policy on the acquisition of antiquities.
In June 2008 the AAMD adopted a "New Report on Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art". The reports stated that AAMD members -- 193 at present -- "should not acquire a work unless research substantiates that the work was outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970 or was legally exported from its probable country of modern discovery after 1970". The choice of 1970 is significant because this coincides with the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
The position was in part prompted by the recent return to Italy of more than 100 antiquities -- among them the Euphronios krater showing the dead Sarpedon -- from several North American museums. Five AAMD institutions were among them.
The AAMD strengthened its position by launching an "Object Registry" that would place in the public domain "all relevant information" about newly acquired antiquities that had no recorded collecting histories prior to 1970.
The AAMD's position seems to be causing concern. The Cultural Property Research Institute, based in Santa Fe (NM), has launched a project to determine "the number of artistically and academically significant, privately-owned objects in the United States that are currently excluded from acquisition by US museums."
This suggests that a number of private collectors in the United States feel that archaeological items that they presently own would no longer be welcomed either as gifts, purchases, or bequests. The AAMD's concerns are probably well-founded: a number of high profile collectors were represented among the returns to Italy (and also to Greece).
The CPRI has raised an important issue. Have private collectors in North America been continuing to acquire recently surfaced antiquities in spite of high profile publicity given to the looting of archaeological sites?
But what will happen to those objects that do not have a documented collecting history that can be traced back to before 1970? Would private collectors consider donating them to museums in the countries where the pieces are likely to have been found or made?
